Attention Economy


Monday, April 25, 2022

Pop Psychology, Fads, and the Rise of ‘Business Experts’

Business gurus are killing productivity with their pop science cults
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/25/businesses-must-get-rid-new-gurus-fads/
ANDREW ORLOWSKI notes:
“Gladwell’s peculiar talent as a storyteller was to find quirky or counter-intuitive stories, and masterfully maintain the suspense, so by the time the banal revelation arrived, it had the quality of a world-shattering epiphany.
This was also the formula behind the hugely successful book Freakonomics, published in 2005, subtitled “the Hidden Side of Everything”. The established Gladwell and Freakonomics transformed business publishing….
Aided by the TED Talks franchise and the emergence of social media, the barrier to becoming a public intellectual, or a business guru, got lower every year. All one needed was an appetite for self-promotion, and a quirky observation or two. An eager readership in marketing departments, typically the most insecure and fad-obsessed corner of any company, couldn’t get enough”.